Nathan SoboNathan Sobo
Perplexing constant scope behavior
edit Posted by Nathan Sobo on Friday August 17, 2007 at 10:28PM

Why can't I refer to constants nested inside a class within a module eval?

irb(main):001:0> class A
irb(main):002:1>    class B
irb(main):003:2>    end
irb(main):004:1> end
=> nil
irb(main):005:0> A.module_eval { puts B }
NameError: uninitialized constant B
           from (irb):5
           from (irb):5:in `module_eval'
           from (irb):5
           from :0

This is frustrating. Can anyone explain why it has to be this way? Perhaps there's a good reason I'm not considering.

Comments

  1. josh josh on August 17, 2007 at 11:02PM

    Doing a module_eval of a block apparently leaves the constants bound in the block's context, not in the eval context. Try adding a top-level constant B = "surprise!" and do it again. But if you change the block to a string, it will bind B to A::B. Isn't Ruby fun sometimes?

  2. Nathan Sobo Nathan Sobo on August 18, 2007 at 12:13AM

    Well it's really sad this is the case. I'm working on a solution to my gripes in the previous post that takes

    describe "Something worth describing" do...

    and turns it into a sanitized/camelized Test::Unit style class with the contents of the block class evaluated inside of it. But if there are constant references in the block, they are bound globally, which kills test isolation. Look here:

    <code>describe "Something worth describing" do
   class RarelyAView
   end
end
</code>

    It would be really nice if this defined SomethingWorthDescribing::RarelyAView so that I could use this constant freely within the test and not worry about other tests' usage of Foo.

    The Frankenstein welding of Rspec and Test::Unit is going well though. For now I can at least fall back on replacing the describe sugar with SomethingWorthDescribingTest &lt; Screw::Unit::TestCase and still use other sugary Rspec syntax within it.

  3. Jacob Radford Jacob Radford on August 18, 2007 at 12:22AM

    You could do something like this:

    A.module_eval { puts self::B }

  4. Wes Maldonado Wes Maldonado on September 13, 2007 at 03:05AM

    Nathan, I remembered you when I read this post about the same problem where Ola Bini give you a real answer:

    it's an artifact of the way Ruby's parsing works. Basically, a "real" constant reference will have it's cref set during parse time - meaning it will be resolved using real lexical scope. The difference here is that when you list all constants in a scope or use const_get, you're really using the dynamic scope